A blog by Ken Harrison

Hangouts or Google Messenger

I’m sure some people give a lot of thought to the text
messaging app they use, but I’ve never been one of them. I just want an app that’s going
to do the job and look good doing it. With that said, I like Google Messenger a
lot. It allows you to color code your text chats so you don’t accidentally mix
them up, makes sharing images and video via a text message simple and allows for group chats. It’s also attractive and easy to use.

Then I started hearing about how much better
Hangouts is when you have Project Fi for your wireless carrier and I was
intrigued. I’d used Hangouts for video chats, but always thought it was bit ugly. Hangouts was going to have to give me something I could not live without for me to make the switch. And that something was the ability to access and get calls and text messages from my computer, tablet and phone, which is something you can only get when you combine Hangouts with Project Fi. And since I use Project Fi for my wireless carrier, this caught my interest.

But hangouts works via the internet, which means I would
have to be on WiFi for it not to count against my data plan. I wasn’t worried
about text messages, which take up very little data, but phone calls and images
or video will take up data. Luckily I don’t get enough images or video sent via text to
be concerned, but calls were another thing. Then I found out that calls made
via my phone app and not the hangouts app will go through as normal calls and not count against data. Only calls made via the Hangouts app will count against data. So as long as I make a receive calls as usual, there will be no issues. Also, the Hangouts app on my phone does not have a dialer (the Hangouts Dialer is an add on that has to be installed separately).

So I made the switch to Hangouts a couple of weeks ago and
have been enjoying it. It’s great getting my texts from my tablet, computer or
phone knowing that the texts will sync between devices. And although I have
only used Hangouts to make a call as a test run, I feel secure knowing that it won’t
take up any data as long as I do it over WiFi (my tablet and computer are WiFi
only anyhow).

Another benefit to using Hangouts for texting is the ability
to switch between texting to Video chat via hangouts. The only down side to
this is that the other person has to have Hangouts installed on their phone,
tablet or computer to use it.

I’ve also become use to the look of Hangouts, but I still
think it’s a bit unattractive. It would also be nice to have my text chats
color coded the way they were in Google Messenger, but perhaps that will be
added in a future update.